“Patience allows us to remain attentive and consider life beyond our personal moment in history. Patience is fierce focus informed by openness, intention, and “fallen light” that draws the eye of our heart toward clear seeing and skillful actions.“

We tend to confuse patience with doing nothing. There’s nothing passive about patience: it offers us discernment between what wants to “emerge” and an “emergency”. Most events are not emergencies but our nervous systems these days are dialed to “hyper vigilance”. There are thousands of good reasons to be awake but hyper vigilance is exhausting.

One early May morning while on solitary retreat this year, I woke up with the word “Faithwalk”. It was loud, clear and provocative: “FAITHWALK”! I laid in bed for a bit to take it in: it was clearly a command and both a noun and a verb.

Just as the wetlands lie between land and sea, so too does our self perception and body meet in the fluidity of the imagination.

The territory of “somatics” is a rich expression of the continuum between body and mind or body and perception. From this perspective, the body is the ground of our experience and psychology becomes the interpretation of our felt sense, our lived experience. There’d be no psychology without a body.

There’s a practice from 11th century Tibet called “tonglen”. It translates as “sending & receiving. It is a body centered heart practice that offers us emotional self regulation: it can relieve helplessness, loneliness, self pity, and self absorption. It deepens connection to ourselves and all other beings.

To bear witness is a potent act. To bear witness is an antidote to helplessness, it is a testimony to our interconnectedness, and it relieves us of complicity because we allow ourselves to actually see the suffering of the world everywhere. None of us are exempt from the trials of this life. We can’t say “we are all one” and then say “but only when it feels good”.